title: Accelerated event-by-event Monte Carlo microdosimetric calculations of electrons and protons tracks on a multi-core CPU and a CUDA-enabled GPU.
abstract: For microdosimetric calculations event-by-event Monte Carlo (MC) methods are considered the most accurate. The main shortcoming of those methods is the extensive requirement for computational time. In this work we present an event-by-event MC code of low projectile energy electron and proton tracks for accelerated microdosimetric MC simulations on a graphic processing unit (GPU). Additionally, a hybrid implementation scheme was realized by employing OpenMP and CUDA in such a way that both GPU and multi-core CPU were utilized simultaneously. The two implementation schemes have been tested and compared with the sequential single threaded MC code on the CPU. Performance comparison was established on the speed-up for a set of benchmarking cases of electron and proton tracks. A maximum speedup of 67.2 was achieved for the GPU-based MC code, while a further improvement of the speedup up to 20% was achieved for the hybrid approach. The results indicate the capability of our CPU-GPU implementation for accelerated MC microdosimetric calculations of both electron and proton tracks without loss of accuracy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, United States. Electronic address: gkalan@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Georgios
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kalantzis
authors.forename: Hidenobu
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Tachibana
mesh_terms: D003201:Computers; D004583:Electrons; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D011522:Protons; D011879:Radiotherapy Dosage
chemical_list: D011522:Protons
keywords: CUDA; GPU; Microdosimetry; Monte Carlo; Proton tracks; Radiation therapy